Posted
by
kdawson
on Saturday September 29, 2007 @07:05PM
from the down-with-clippy dept.

biscuitfever11 writes "ZDNet has up a great interview with Michael Meeks, the distinguished Novell engineer, who's currently deeply involved in open document format and OpenOffice.org. In the interview, Meeks takes Microsoft to task on its alternative format OOXML and argues that Microsoft should adopt ODF — but says that realistically they never will. He also mentions his favorite example to explain the benefits of open source software to a nontechnical person: the flexibility of open source would have allowed us to free ourselves from Clippy, the world's most despised paperclip, by changing a single line of code."

Unfortunately this clippy example is more showing how open source could be great. Right now, in OpenOffice, there is by default clippy activated! (of course it's not called 'clippy', it's called 'help agent'.) So, no, even open source is affected by clippy. Either human kind is doomed, or open source community is very tricky to understand.

Well, at least the OpenOffice clippy hasn't told me anything so far. It's just there, on the bottom of my screen smiling and cheerfully eating up a little bit of the memory space and graphical space. Maybe it's there to appease the user by helping him to believe it's really like MS office? It's just not working on me...

That would have depended on the changes they proposed...Any proposed changes would have been evaluated, and if the different vendors reached a consensus that the changes provided a valid benefit, then they would have been accepted.Many of the garbage that microsoft put into ooxml would probably have been rejected, because it provides no benefit to end users or any vendor except microsoft. Similarly, any requirements without full implementation details would have been rejected.